press

heavy ranting today folks.
with certain notable exceptions, the press is a whore. they exploit every possible event and distort the truth in order to gain viewers / readers. everybody knows (should know) that. but if being a whore wasn't bad enough, a certain part of the press can justly be labeled a stupid whore. For instance: after a month-long drought followed by a day of light rain, mr. weather reporter reports: "starting tomorrow we're finally getting rid of the rain". But this is only a mild example. It makes me want to live in Afghanistan with all the uneducated people there using primitive tools instead of electricity when I hear people measuring energy in "kW/h". And I'm talking about people in the hi-tech, computers-magazine-type press. Dude, I mean, he only played a significant role in the industrial revolution that ultimately brought you all this comfort and gadgetry, why the hell should you know what a watt is?! Right? In school I was expected to know the year, month, day and preferrably hour when Johnny Walkman the Great signed the ass-kissing treaty of Cockpissville, plus all the mountains, mountain passes (with height to four significant digits), mountain peaks (with height to four significant digits), hills (with height to...), plains (), rivers (length in km with four,,.,.....), bla-blas, cities with sexually-hinting and otherwise stupid names (with population, thankfully with only 1 significant digit), know all the blokes who are claimed to have written valuable literature, know their work,...... and people that report "news" to other millions of people don't even know what a watt-hour is, or that "knots" are a measure of speed. Yeah, today someone was reporting a boat's top speed in knots per hour. I smiled :) Maybe I should understand that in such a fast-moving, ever-changing world, people feel the need to think of everything as an acceleration. Or maybe I should re-re-evaluate the necessary bit width of stupid, again.

man space man enter

I was watching some documentary on some channel while the other was airing commercials, about air crashes. Except for all the sensationalist parts, it's acceptable and fair to watch. So this pilot was flying some large passenger plane and suddenly hits turbulence or something, I wasn't paying attention. What I did pay attention to was the way he managed to crash it into some houses on the ground killing a lot of people. It seems the rudder control sensitivity was higher than he expected and so he violently jerked it full-swing left and right, repeatedly, thinking the plane's erratic movement was due to the (long-gone) turbulence. In fact he was fucking up the plane himself. This violent struggle with the obedient machine, pictured through the usual crappy computer graphics, continued until the tail fell off from the excessive and repeated stress. Partly the builder's fault, but come on! I could be potentially sitting quietly in my home, and suddenly be crashed by a falling plane, why, because the pilot didn't RTFM! (Fire and smoke and shitty CGI again). Yes, human life is just another commodity. Sad.
P.S.: Kids! Read The Friendly Manual!

hammer

Nearly all tools can be repurposed to function as a hammer, even though very few tools are intentionally designed for it.

A hammer is a useful thing. For example:
What to do when your design needs 38 macrocells so it won't fit in an XC9536 CPLD?
You can:
a) use an XC9572 at almost twice the cost and fill up the rest with
a.1. (a piece of) another design from a separate piece of hardware (see c.1)
a.2. a new, useful feature
a.3. a new, gratuitous feature ('because I can, dammit!')
a.4. nothing
b) move a small piece to external discrete logic (if possible)
c) repartition the design
c.1. move some functionality to other hardware
c.2. move some functionality to software
d) fuck the compiler/synthesizer/translator/mapper/fitter and hand-optimize (hopeless, the machine is always better than you)
d) use a hammer as pictured.

All hail the alias- and quantization-noise-ridden, superbly crappy picture.

CO_2 bullcrap

I've been meaning for a lot of time to write an article about how much I hate cars and traffic and pollution. For instance, instead of being forced to attend sports class in school, I would have very much preffered being able to use my bike instead of the subway/underground between the school and my apartment. But I was not, because until recently bikes were banned on a lot of streets and more importantly because there are too many fucking cars. Besides Romanian drivers being one of the most uncivilized in the EU, there's the damn smoke! The same fucking smoke that enters my window when I try to ventilate the room. It stinks and most probably is not healthy. Between the idiot that invented the suit and tie, and the cretin that thought about putting LEAD into gasoline,... I wish I had the money/power to erect a grand statue of human shame. They're not allowing Pb in circuit boards now because it's toxic; this makes the circuits unreliable. It's a totally unnecessary measure, as all the lead in those circuit boards would ideally be recycled. But cars in Romania and other countries have been running on leaded gasoline for years, without anyone caring. It's being phased out now, but exhaust fumes still STINK! I've seen a documentary that correctly argues that artificial CO_2 does not cause global warming. And even if it did, who the fuck cares? People are living in Africa and South Asia and Central America just fine with very high temperatures. Extreme weather? Look at it this way: besides there being absolutely no evidence that we're causing hurricanes and floods, more people probably die in car accidents than in said hurricanes and floods. So I don't give a flying fuck about the CO_2 in car exhaust, I just hate cars, and please replace the shit in gasoline that's toxic and stinky when burned! It's not global warming we should be worrying about, it's pollution and toxicity. Dust, industrial ash, acoustic noise and light pollution. Yes, and ideatic pollution from all the commercials, religious extremists, political extremists, environmental extremists and so on. We should probably be worrying about increasing oil prices rather than CO_2. And we actually are, and new technologies are being developed. Why am I ranting then? Because of all the wrongness.
P.S. There are a lot of substances that, when properly burned, only release CO_2 and H_2O in the atmosphere, and no crap such as ash or lead, nitrogen, sulphur or phosphorous oxides. Problem is, they're expensive. One example is alcohol, which can be produced by bacteria from just about any oranic stuff, but it's more economically used as booze rather than fuel.

beer

Beer is good for your soul.

relativity

everything is relative, even this statement.
axioms are a product of the mind.
the mind can understand its own structure?
an idea or thought that defines its own structure?

i feel like feeling something but i'm not sure what. because i'm defective.

sleeplessness

i sail on unknown waters running away from the dawn
i fear the sun and its deadly rays
the cold wind takes me away into the deepest night
and there is nothing in sight.
i've been sailing for centuries, all alone,
just me and the stars
and the thick black clouds that come and go
same wind, same sea, same stars, same moon
same quiet waves, same emptiness
same search for something i know nothing of
same expectation of change
i am trapped in a dark eternal one-sided shell.